The Genesis of Gender Transgression

Inasmuch as Creation, the work of developing ever more refined distinctions, is necessarily a matter of drawing boundaries, sculpting the mess of the pre-formed world, the chaos, the "tohu va-vohu," the primal, planetary mud into units of meaning, Adam and Eve acquire self-definition by losing their unity with God, planet, and one another. The unstated explanation for our need to create identity categories is about our mortality, and that is: Our first stories reveal a quiet desperation to defy the law of entropy that would pull people back to our earthly beginning (and end), the place—the earth from which we came and to which we return—where all cultural distinctions had been, and will again be, effaced.